Tag Archives: Thunderbird

We have had a couple requests to write a post about readpst which is included in the default path of Backtrack 5 and also located in the Backtrack menu underneath Forensics/Forensics Analysis Tools. The readpst application will read PST files which are also known as Microsoft Outlook Personal Folders and convert them to mbox, MH, or KMail formats. There are various other switches that can be used to output each email into a separate file, include attachments, modify contact formats, be recursive, etc. I will explain basic functionality below along with a couple of the formats and various switches.

When clicking on hyperlinks that are set to open a compose email message on OSX the Mail.app application will launch. Since it is likely that your preferred email application is something other than Mail.app such as Mozilla Thunderbird, Opera, Microsoft Outlook for Mac, Postbox, Sparrow, or something else then you will want to change the default email client to your preferred email application. In my case I use MS Outlook for the Mac so I needed to set the default email client to Outlook. Use the directions below to modify the default application that opens to compose email messages.

I recently switched back to Thunderbird from Outlook for various reasons and I ran into a annoying little thing. When replying to a message the cursor automatically goes to the bottom of the message, under the quoted text. I found this really annoying because it means you have to read or scroll past all the parts of the previous conversation before getting to the new part. After a little bit of messing with the settings I found the solution.

A colleague at work today had some questions regarding Google Calendar that I attempted to assist him with. In the process I ran into some things that didn’t make a lot of sense to me so I wanted to point out some of the issues I found with importing Calendar Events into Google Calendar. Below I will explain the error I received and how I worked around the error and was able to successfully import the items I had been having an issue with.

If you use Google Calendar as your primary calendar for work the chances are that from time to time you receive calendar items from people using Microsoft Outlook. These calendar items which are sent as .ICS files are easy to import into Google so you don’t have to manually type the entry into your Google Calendar. Follow the directions below to import Outlook calendar items into Google Calendar.

**NOTE: If you are using Thunderbird to copy/paste iCalendar items into ICS files and then import into Google Calendar you will more than likely receive an import error. Please read this article for a resolution to that issue. The error will say “Failed to import events. Could not upload your events because you do not have sufficient access on the target calendar.” This may be a problem with other mail clients as well but I have only confirmed it to be so with Thunderbird.